From the boneyard

I just found a folder with a bunch of my own report cards, and some photos from when I was about ten. Here’s a class photo from fifth grade [I added the highlight. Don’t know why I’m not wearing glasses here, I’d had them for nearly a year at this point] –

Here is an example of some early extra-curricular work, apparently a wiring diagram drawn on the back of a math test.

Frankly I don’t see what it’s trying to accomplish. At all. Which is really nothing new, since I often go back to things I’ve written only six months ago with the same sense of bewilderment. “This is so unstructured. What undisciplined child wrote this garbage?” Now you know why people hide their eyes and groan when I go to a whiteboard. “Let’s have this robot represent the database. Now, the rays from its eyes are the persistent TCP connections to….”

Heck, I’d go for that kind of “fun” angle on UML any day.

There’s a bunch more where these came from, including a short story titled “The Short Circuit Robot,” which is indeed about as bad as you can possibly imagine, and a bunch of report cards that say the same depressing things year after year. Other folders from later years have nearly every receipt from Computer Literacy (I don’t know why, either) and my first performance review from Atari (which jumped me from slave wages to merely a really good deal for them after I made them literally millions on a couple games I wrote for them. Hoo ha).